A review of the methods for the dependability assessment of WSNs: Towards a new approach

Dependability is becoming one of the most crucial non functional properties of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), as their adoption is more and more hypothesized in critical application scenarios. The extensive use of the WSNs in these scenarios stresses the need to verify their dependability properties at design time to prevent wrong design choices and at runtime in order to make a WSN more robust against failures that may occur during its operation. In literature, several methods have been proposed in order to evaluate the dependability of a WSN from its early stages to its operating. In this paper we present a review of the adopted methods to assess the dependability in the WSNs. By means of a comparison grid, tables and graphics we analyze the current state-of-the-art of the proposed methods identifying the benefits and discuss the ongoing challenges. Finally we propose a new formal-based approach.